


in the emptiness you left behind

by astarisms



Category: The Daevabad Trilogy - S. A. Chakraborty
Genre: Angst, Gen, and losing nahri once again, dara mourning his dumb decisions, in celebration of eog arcs dropping i have finally finished something, kingdom of copper spoilers, this title is so stupid im sorry ill probbaly change it but im rushing SKDFLSDF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:08:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22605235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astarisms/pseuds/astarisms
Summary: weeks after the fall of daevabad, he still doesn't know where nahri and her qahtani prince disappeared to. but he hopes her room can tell him something of what her life had been like in the years he'd been fighting his way back to her.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	in the emptiness you left behind

It’s taken Dara weeks to work up the courage to come this far. The infirmary is dark, its patients slumbering, some more restlessly than others, but all of them unaware of Dara’s presence standing at the unmarked door in the back.

The one that leads to Nahri’s bedroom.

He brushes his fingers over the pattern in the wood, trying to still the tremble of them. She’s not here, and he has little knowledge and less faith that she’ll ever return after escaping her gilded prison, but it still feels like an invasion of her privacy.

It still feels like he’s making a choice she has no say in, and one that she wouldn’t approve of. 

_ I’m so sorry _ , he thinks, pressing his forehead to the wood, not that his apologies have ever meant anything to anyone. Too little, too late, in the wake of all the destruction he brings with him wherever he goes.

His hand falls to the knob, but he pauses, uncertain if he should continue.

_ She hates you _ , his mind whispers, remembering the defiance, the anger in her eyes right before she’d dropped a ceiling on him. He could hardly blame her.  _ She wouldn’t want you in here _ . 

Dara closes his eyes against the thought, against the pain it brings him because he knows it to be true. She had met the monster, and she despised it.

How could he have ever thought, for a single moment, that there could be any other outcome?

But for all that she hated him, the ache of losing her again was nearly overwhelming. Five years, he had waited to see her again. Five years, he had clawed and fought his way back to her. 

Their encounter had been so brief, he knew little about how she had fared the past years. Anything would do, to reassure him that her life hadn’t been entirely miserable following his disastrous mistake.

He opens the door and steps inside, shutting it softly behind him.

It’s immediate, the sense of emptiness. The  _ wrongness _ of this room, without its Nahid to warm it, to breathe life into it. 

It feels suffocating. It feels cold. 

Dara forces himself to take another step.

There is a fine layer of dust coating the surfaces, and an array of pins spread out across the vanity, no doubt where Nisreen had tried to tame Nahri’s wild curls for Navasatem.

The memory of the holiday brings a bitter taste to his mouth. Still, even now there should have been people celebrating in the streets, drinking and merrymaking.

But Daevabad is still and silent as death outside the palace walls, and he had only himself to blame. 

He forces the thought away and takes another step.

Her plain hospital tunic and pants are still haphazardly folded over the end of her bed, as if she’d been in a rush to change and rushed further still out the door after her shift. 

Something in his chest constricts painfully. He wonders how much she had improved, in his absence. Her power had been exceptional — he could only imagine that she had made leaps and bounds since that day in the infirmary, when she’d confided in him that she had little idea what she was doing, when she’d trusted him enough to drop the mask and let him see how stressed she had been.

He wishes he could go back to that moment. To tell her how brilliant she would become, how brilliant she already was.

So many things he had left unsaid, too busy trying to carve out a space for her in his world —  _ their  _ world. But she hadn’t needed him to. Nahri, a force all her own, had never needed his help. 

And what good had his plans done for her, anyways? They had only brought her more pain, more hardship. He remembers the way she had looked at him that last night and his hands curl into fists.

_ You deserved it _ , his mind taunts.  _ Demon. Murderer. Monster.  _

He clenches his jaw against the sharp ache the thought brings, and takes another step, further sullying what might have been Nahri’s only sanctuary in this palace that was her home by birthright and her prison by his mistakes.

_ She fears you. _

He swallows hard, casting his eyes about the room again.

_ She’s disgusted by you _ .

He takes a deep breath through his nose, trying to calm the riotous beat of his heart.

_ She hates you. _

His blood rushes in his ears, overcoming the eerie, empty silence in the room.

Moonlight catches on something beneath her pillow, the uncovered edge glinting in the darkness. Something that might be a laugh or a sob escapes him in a quiet huff as he makes his way towards it, because it was so  _ Nahri _ .

To be the future queen, and to still keep her valuables hidden, tucked away in case there was need of a quick escape. 

A lot of good her stash had done her, in the end.

He pushes the thought away as he comes to stand by the head of her bed, and pulls the pillow away. His breath leaves him all at once. His heart, pounding so hard he could hear it only moments ago, stutters to a stop, along with everything else.

With a trembling hand, he reaches down to touch the familiar, gilded hilt of the dagger, nestled against the sheets where it had hid under her pillow. The metal is cool against his fingers, and he traces the inlaid design more than he sees it through the tears that blur his vision.

He turns and sits on the edge of the bed before his legs can give out beneath him, lifting his dagger as if it were made of glass instead of the steel that had remained unblemished for more than a millennia.

She had kept it.

She had slept with it by her head.

Even after she’d learned of his past, his crimes ( _ “Is it true, what they say about you? _ ” she’d asked), nearly six years after the fact she still had it.

And for the first time since this whole mess had begun, since he’d invaded this city for Manizheh and her broken cause, since he’d lost all of the young Daeva he’d trained, Dara bows his head, clutching the dagger and pressing it to his brow, and lets himself cry. 


End file.
